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No one should be discouraged from computer science

I read a blog post where the author said the women who dropped out of programming “should have been discouraged” because it’s not for everyone and many women try to use smiles and flattery to get men to do their work for them. I actually have had the experience the author cites, but with both…

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How many lines of code have you deleted?

One of the many questions on start-up accelerator applications that make me go “Hmm”, is this question : How many lines of code have you written? I have heard of, but thankfully never worked at, organizations that evaluated their technical staff by the lines of code written. Let me give you two stories that illustrate…

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Playing around with Javascript and impact.js

The Invisible Developer had commented that I write an awful lot about SAS and maybe I should write about some other language. For Christmas last year, someone gave me an impact.js license so I made a little game where players drop snares to catch rabbits and collect berries. This doesn’t have much educational value,  I…

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Start-up Advice after Founder Friday Women 2.0

Most start-up events waste my time. Founder Friday Women 2.0 was one of the few exceptions. Generally,  at start-up events, the people who have an actual company make up a tiny fraction of the attendees, being out-numbered at least 5 to 1 by people with “an idea for a company”. The remainder of those in…

The NOT good thing about The Hard Thing about Hard Things

Got interrupted by coding, meetings, flying across country, teaching judo, more meetings and flying back across country. Just finishing The Hard Thing about Hard Things and and I thought it was a terrific book EXCEPT for the part about not hiring people from your friend’s companies. I completely disagreed with this, and even though I…

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Make Something, Make a Difference, Make Money

Yesterday, I did the Happy Dance in my office when we finished version 2.2 of Spirit Lake. I said that despite taking me away from virtually every other interest in my life, being obsessed with a start-up is worth it. WHY? In thinking it over today, I realized that 7 Generation Games meets every possible…

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The Pros and Cons of Being Obsessed

Really useful advice for start-ups on How Not to Die from Paul Graham emphasized  The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble…. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but…

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Taking All of Your Children to Work Days: My take away from let’s move

When I add up all of the ad revenue from this blog on top of the business it garners, in a good month it might average out to $30 an hour and in a not-so-good month maybe $10. Since my consulting rate is a heck of a lot more than $30 an hour you might…

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Random file, open data, website-love & Day 11 of the 20-day blogging challenge

As I mentioned yesterday, banging away at 7 Generation Games has led to less time for blogging and a whole pile of half-written posts shoved into cubbyholes of my brain. So, today, I reached into the random file and  coincidentally came out with a second post on open data … The question for Day 11…